George Inness At Auction

This past weekend saw two paintings by George Inness at auction, one with a Pittsburgh connection. The first was offered by Fontain’s Auctions in Massachusetts and sold for $10,000, exceeding the estimate of $5,000-$6,000. The price would seem very reasonable. We wrote to ask for a condition report and found that there was much inpainting in the sky. The auction house said they couldn’t see any reason why the sky would have been impainted, however. The second seemed to be an early Inness and bears more likeness to a Hudson River School painting than the later style he was well known for. It shows a stream and birch trees. The interesting thing to those in Western, Pennsylvania is the label on the back “J.J. Gillespie, 35 Wood Street.” At some point the painting had been in Pittsburgh’s first art gallery. If you’re in the market for an Inness or painting with a Pittsburgh connection, you may be in luck… Midwest Auctions had some sort of difficulty and the this Inness will be relisted.

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About Art After X

With the death of President Kennedy in 1963, America changed. As hard as it is to minimize that sentiment, the effect of Dallas was even greater. The same year saw the merging of the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, which had been central to the art scene, and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Douglas MacAgy, then the director of DMCA, not only opposed the merger, but also declined to directorship of the combined museum. The regionalist movement which had been strong for decades, was giving way to more of an interest in what was going on nationally, and internationally. Like it or not, Dallas was on the national stage.
When the Kennedy’s arrived in Fort Worth, local collectors had decorated a hotel room with internationally-renowned works. While the president and his wife learned a great deal about the ability of Texans to collect major art, there was little they could glean about the local scene in this era-defining city.
With this in mind, we have begun a project to look not back at the art scene in Dallas, but foreword from 1963. We are interviewing gallery owners, curators and others involved in the art scene then, but this will be a story told mostly through interviews with artists active in the city from that point into the 1980s.
The result will be a book with a video component.
We hope you will join us in our journey. The hashtag for the project is #artafterx and the url artafterx.com will point to the latest updates on this weblog.
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